Everything you always wanted to know about KCRW*

*but didn't realize you could ask

In November 2008, Jason Bentley became the DJ for Morning Becomes Eclectic, taking over KCRW's flagship music show from Nic Harcourt, who had been at the helm for the previous 10 years. One day not long after the handover, I was listening to MBE and began wondering if the sound of the show changed. It seemed that way to me. It also seemed like the sound of other shows had changed. Garth Trinidad's show had gone from three hours per week to two hours every weeknight, and his show also sounded different to me. Still, I was not yet convinced that the change in sound was real and not just an artifact of how I perceived KCRW. I wanted to see if the data bore out my intuition, so I started downloading and analyzing KCRW playlists.

I created several different visualizations to better understand the playlist data. Each visualization is an attempt to answer a question. I selected 23 KCRW DJs, with a preference for those active during both Nic Harcourt's tenure as MBE DJ and Jason Bentley's, and looked at which artists they played during six-month windows of time. This analysis forms the basis of most of the visualizations. I also included data for the Eclectic24 all-music station, and the show Morning Becomes Eclectic, regardless of who was DJing, in visualizations where this additional information could be easily incorporated. These are the results.